


upon the housetops

by cicak



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Frottage, M/M, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn with Feelings, Sex in the Dark, bunny has enough feelings for the whole of greater london, erotic cigarette lighting, food as metaphor for sex, men frantically stripping each other out of eveningwear: the novella, raffles week, victorian euphemisms for penis, victorian gentlemen in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-07 09:17:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10357134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: In which Bunny ponders his career, scripture and the past, while Raffles is all too fond of the darkness.





	

I hadn’t seen Raffles for several weeks, barely even heard from him, the telephone lying silent in its cradle. The sports pages had been silent for mention of him, which was understandable given the season. I reasoned that he would have told me had he gone to Australia for their summer season.

Well, perhaps.

I was settled in with good whisky and a bad book, completely content, when the knocking of the door rose me up.

Raffles looked like a fashion plate, as usual. He was holding his hat in his hands, and I observed that his hair was perfect underneath it. He really was maddening. Each curl was like a cresting wave.

“Come, we have a reservation for ten” he said, stepping past me.

“Hallo AJ” I said to his retreating back. “I’m not hungry” I said, shutting the door behind him. “AJ, listen. I’m not up for going out tonight” I said, as he dropped down into my armchair.

I ran my hand through my hair. “Raffles, I just stoked the fire and topped up my glass, and the book is coming to a rather thrilling climax. I do not want to go out and play tonight.”

“Never mind that”, Raffles said, picking up my glass and draining my drink. “I read that last week. The butler did it. Now, get dressed. We’re going to the club.”

Fuming, I stomped into my bedroom and began pulling off my pajamas, and shrugged on my favourite suit. I was so sure that the cousin was responsible! 

I wasn’t hungry when curled up in the warmth of my flat, content to indulge my mind alone, and if I’m being honest, I wasn’t hungry with the steak lying in front of me. Not even after we took the long way round to the club, through the park, had my appetite arisen. The night was chilly despite the heat of the day, that curse of early spring, and I kept my coat buttoned to the neck, and my arm linked through Raffles’, his warmth a reassuring presence beside me.

I had come out with him into the cold because I could never resist him anything he desired, and I had learned to let the nagging voice in my head, that said that anything Raffles wanted would ultimately hurt me, go. It was just dinner. It was good for me to get out of the house. There was no telltale bulge of Raffles’ cracking tools in his pocket. A couple of glasses of wine would help me sleep as well as whisky could.

The steak that night at the club was a tough old thing, and so conversation between Raffles and I was sparser than usual. Or more, I was talking about the same amount as I normally was, but Raffles was silent, save for the occasional grunts as he met another piece of (admittedly delicious) gristle. 

I tried to engage him in conversation about the book he had so unfairly ruined, but he just shook his hand and refilled my glass.

“Do you ever think about getting back to writing?” Raffles said, swallowing a large mouthful of Merlot. “Not journalism, novels. Fiction. The kind of penny-thriller we both enjoy so much.”

I scoffed. “What would I write about?” I asked. “They say to write what you know, but I think that you would have something to say about that Raffles!”

"What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops” he quoted, cryptically. 

I had got better at Raffles’ double-talk, the way he said one thing with his throat, another with his lips and yet another with his eyes. I had studied Raffles’ face far more thoroughly than I had scripture, which is why the verse went over my head, at the time.

“I do find the light a trifle uncomfortable”, Raffles continued, voice thick with double meaning. “I would be content to walk through the night for the rest of my days, given the right companion, of course”.

And suddenly, the club was plunged into darkness. Every electric candle cut out, as if to punctuate Raffles’ point.

There was a stunned silence in the club, as everyone froze. Then came the shouting, the staff rushing to find candles and matches.

In the darkness, Raffles reached across the table and took my hand. He ran his thumb across my knuckles, tracing each one with the soft pad of his thumb.

“Let’s get a cab, Bunny”, he said. His voice was soft, like the voice he uses to keep me calm when I start to panic. “There is unlikely to be much peace to be found here.”

We stood up, and he didn’t let go. The darkness hid our joining, our brazen crime, and the way our fingers found themselves intertwining as we wound around the tables. 

I didn’t want to think, for fear of jinxing the whole thing. When we stepped out into the cool night, even the gas lamps had gone out. The sky was cloudy, the moon just a diffused glow, half forgotten in the vastness of the sky.

Raffles let go of my hand and pulled his Sullivans case out of his breast pocket. He offered me one, and then lit the match for me, holding it so the light was hidden, and then ducked his head down and lit his cigarette off mine, pressing the tips together for a moment too long. I watched the ember transfer and cast a subtle light on Raffles’ face as he sucked in quick, watching it spread.

The clatter of hooves on stone was what pulled us out of the wordless trance we were in, and Raffles flung his hand out to flag it down. 

We climbed in, and Raffles gave his address. When I went to give mine, he squeezed my hand. “Come in for a drink” he said, simply. 

I had no breath left in my body to exhale, but it felt like every part of my body was numb except for the pressure of his hand against mine. 

He turned on the lights when we came in. He turned to lock the door, and I took off my overcoat, going through the motions of arriving into the Albany, all things normal and unremarkable. Then, he turned back to me, and the last thing I saw in the full bulb light was his smile, dreadfully wicked, and then, very deliberately, he flicked the light switch off.

We threw ourselves at each other. The furniture must have sensed something, because there was nothing blocking the path between my body and Raffles’. Our hands linked first, knitting together perfectly, and then it was only natural for our mouths to find each other. I had not kissed him before, I had barely kissed anyone before, certainly not like this, with the very passion of my whole soul, but the human animal has that instinct, the same as anything else.

Raffles was the one to unlink our hands, and he put them beneath my tail coat, beneath even my waistcoat, until his hands were pressed against the thin cotton of my shirt. I half expect to look at that shirt tomorrow and see his handprint scorched in like a too-hot iron. His hands did not linger. I wrapped my arms around his neck, dug my fingers in his hair, and he went to divesting me of my best togs.

I will never forget the feel of his strong hands as he slid them beneath the shoulders, and pushed the jacket down my arms, taking each moment to feel the lines of me. I remember the way he undid the waistcoat, and the feeling as each stud gave beneath his fingers, the sound they made as they clattered to the floor.

My hands shook as they followed his example. I took note of the fine material of his jacket, the fine silk that my hands exposed as I touched the lining, shockingly intimate, a hidden thing between a man and his tailor, and here I was, my fingers in his seams. 

I was overcome, overheated and half-mad, and so once his jacket was off, I took the placket of his shirt between my fist and pulled. I relished in the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop of each stud being forced from its home. 

It was nothing compared to the feeling of easing the buttons of his trousers open, as he shrugged his braces from his shoulders. I was on my knees in supplication at the altar of the fine wool gabardine, but when I looked up, I saw the mess I had made. Raffles, the society gentleman, his shirt open to show his lightly sculpted chest, the dark hair there as riotously curly as what he kept beneath his hat. 

His pego was rising, and suddenly my missing appetite from dinner returned. I gorged myself upon his prick, took the taste and the sensation, the whole meal of him, until I was full of nothing but him, soup to nuts.

Raffles had no appetite for the same meal as me, instead choosing to take his time. He sampled me, took a little here and there. He kissed his way around my body as if trying to map my every pore, but in no order I could fathom. He would worship an area, and then come back to drink deep from my mouth, then resumed his adventures somewhere in a different hemisphere. I was fully nude, standing like a statue in his living room, but not like the statues in the British Museum. No vicar had taken the evidence of my manhood to save the prying eyes of the lower classes; if Raffles knew better then he made no protestation, and with the lights out, there was nothing so much to see as to feel.

It felt like hours since we had entered the flat when he finally gave me relief, wrapping his admirable hands around my body and pulling me close to him, and letting me rut between our bodies until I spent across his prick, half-hard again from the friction, and whimpered into his wet, wet mouth.

We stood there in the moonlight, the evidence of my crime cooling across his body, while his lay secreted away in my belly. The shadows were long as knives across his face, and I couldn’t make out his expression. Instead, I leaned in to kiss him, and he instead stepped back, leading me across the room to his bed.

I thought of this, the day I got my hands on the first copy of my collected stories. I couldn’t remember exactly where that night had sat in the annals of our crimes, the chronology of our adventures muddled together by the narrative and my publisher’s pen. 

I opened my bible and thumbed through to Matthew. Most verses appear in my head in the voice of the school’s imperious scripture master, committed to memory through fear of the rod, that long lost relic of a proper education. That verse, though, will always be in Raffles’ voice, speaking from beyond the veil, conveying a special meaning, just for me.

Closing my eyes, I sat back, and listened to his voice in my head.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jesus for the quote.
> 
> Come hang with me on tumblr at [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com) or on twitter @chicketychak


End file.
